Devoured

The dastardly deeds of a dead star have been discovered by an intrepid team of cosmic detectives.A white dwarf star that devoured at least a chunk of one of its planets has been betrayed by a scar of vaporized metal marring it surface – the tell-tale remnants of the planet that once orbited the star before spiraling into its doom.What makes it even more interesting is that rather than spreading out across the surface of the star, the material was localized to one place. It's a discovery that helps necroplanetologists…

A gas giant exoplanet 634 light-years away has a quirk in its atmosphere that suggests it may have swallowed a smaller world.It's WASP-76b, and it's already famous for being one of the hottest exoplanets in the galaxy. Whipping around its host star once every 1.8 days, WASP-76b reaches temperatures above 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,632 Fahrenheit), and previous analyses of its atmosphere suggested that it rains liquid iron.Now, led by astronomer Stefan Pelletier of the University of Montreal in Canada, an international team…

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta has bought Audio Analytic, a Cambridge-based startup building AI-driven sound recognition software. Founded in 2010 by Chris Mitchell, Audio Analytic aims to augment consumer technology with high-end sound recognition, and has trained its AI to recognize a broad range of sounds, including smoke alarms, dogs barking, windows breaking, or even babies crying. As per the company’s website, its technology can give machines the “most accurate, robust, and compact…

Originally predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, black holes are the most extreme object in the known Universe.These objects form when stars reach the end of their life cycle, blow off their outer layers, and are so gravitationally powerful that nothing (not even light) can escape their surfaces.They are also of interest because they allow astronomers to observe the laws of physics under the most extreme conditions. Periodically, these gravitational behemoths will devour stars and other objects in their…

The fearsome megalodon (Otodus megalodon) was a giant shark that once ruled the world's oceans, millions of years ago. Fearsome reputation aside, the famous predator left very little trace of its existence.New research on an exceptionally well-preserved fossil has now given us the first 3D model of the extinct fish, one that tells us it could cruise at speeds faster than any shark in the ocean today.Moreover, it was so large, scientists have found, that it could devour in just five bites whole prey the size of today's…